Idle Weekend January 29, 2016: Far Gone Prestige

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I enjoyed the Fargo talk, especially Rob teasing out some of the things that make Peggy interesting for precisely the reasons that she skirts closely to a smear campaign for feminism. I also wish there had been more talk about the other female characters in the show, especially the two other matriarchs of their respective families. Jean Smart, cast against type as Floyd Gerhardt, I didn't pay much heed until late in the season, although I've read that she's doing clever work there upon which Rob touched briefly, but I think that Betsy is a truly excellent character: supportive and caring without just being a prop for her husband, possibly smarter and more talented than her husband at his job (if not for the baby and the chemo, who knows where she'd be), and most significantly, the only person who effectively answers Camus-quoting Noreen. For me, it's one of the more effective scenes in the entire season (and a definite answer to Peggy's directionless speech about her need for ideological validation and Lou's cogent-but-hypocritical anecdote about compassion during war that somewhat vindicates Peggy's efforts to stay on top of the bull, masculine bullshit aside).

Betsy Solverson: Well, I don't know who that is. But I'm guessing he doesn't have a 6-year-old girl.Noreen Vanderslice: He's French.Betsy Solverson: Ugh, I don't care if he's from Mars. Nobody with any sense would say something that foolish. We're put on this earth to do a job. And each of us gets the time we get to do it. And when this life is over and you stand in front of the Lord... Well, you try tellin' him it was all some Frenchman's joke.

She's the only one who gets that. Everyone else is just snowed under by the nihilism, either explicitly or through the events of the show. I think Betsy's quiet, but effortlessly assertive decency is meant to be contrasted with Peggy's over-intellectualized "don't think, just be" philosophy that slowly gets developed. That's what keeps me from seeing the latter as a poison-pen letter to feminism or female characters.

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Really enjoying Idle Weekend. I sometimes disagree with Rob or Danielle's ideas but it's always a pleasure to hear them articulated. Also it's a great source of discovery. I had no idea who William Buckley was!

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Been enjoying the show and thought the Fargo spoiler discussion was interesting. I personally felt a lot of sympathy for Peggy throughout the show despite her actions, and I especially felt for her in her monologue that gets cut off when the cop essentially tells her to shut up in so many words and then proceeds with his own monologue to define her situation for her. That's what's been happening her whole life, as Rob said, she isn't living her life on her own terms. She knows life is supposed to be more but isn't the sharpest thinker in the world, so she continues to let others define her, even when it comes to figuring out how to define herself.

I never felt Hanzee had the mystical Native American bit going either. He can do the tracking and survivalist stuff you would expect from the stereotypical portrayal. But he also mentions that a bunch of racist white assholes in Vietnam used to force him to clear tunnels and do all sorts of intensely dangerous stuff because he was a Native American. I always took his skill set to be a result of that racist treatment in Vietnam. Racism made him into what he was, in my mind, and then racism took advantage of that when he got back.

I never felt that Mike Milligan was a racist portrayal of African Americans either. He's basically always one of the smartest guys in the room. He knows exactly what he's doing when he does it, so if he affects his speech to borrow from 70's jive, he's doing it like a chess player positioning a piece to set something up a few moves later (maybe three) or to slightly disarm the other person, or who knows. I never felt he did it because some white writers room felt that all African Americans must have spoken like that in the 70s. Milligan used maybe the racist conventions of his time by choice for an end.

I never dug the UFOs, just like I never dug them in The Man Who Wasn't There.

In the end, for me, Fargo's second season wasn't just stylishly handled, it was also one of the most confidently crafted seasons of television I have ever seen. I would put it up there with the best season of The Wire or Justified's second season in terms of craftsmanship. Whether I agreed with the choices or not (like the UFOs), I never felt like I was watching a show handled by someone who didn't know exactly what he wanted and how to get it. I felt that way with season 1 most of the time, but more so here.

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Those narrated 'mission briefings' were great. They still hold up too (I'll post one below). It's actually one of my favourite narratives in any game. I can listen to the guy who reads them forever. Considering how much of an unsolved issue narrative in games is I'm always a little amazed how something so simple can work so well, it's all down to execution I suppose.

Just listen to this guy:

I love the Myth narrator. I'm glad they decided that in Myth II the narrator would still sound exactly the same even though it's like 60 years later. You need that voice actor in a Myth game.

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I never felt Hanzee had the mystical Native American bit going either. He can do the tracking and survivalist stuff you would expect from the stereotypical portrayal. But he also mentions that a bunch of racist white assholes in Vietnam used to force him to clear tunnels and do all sorts of intensely dangerous stuff because he was a Native American. I always took his skill set to be a result of that racist treatment in Vietnam. Racism made him into what he was, in my mind, and then racism took advantage of that when he got back.

Yeah, Hanzee's another character about whom I was undecided but eventually came down on liking. Like Peggy, he's a person defined by the expectations of the people around him, to the point that he has no visible history or identity outside of his time in Vietnam and his service to the Gerhardt clan, but, upon encountering Peggy and her inarticulate yearning, immediately catches it with his whole "Tired of this life" comment. I almost wonder if Hanzee's ruthless pursuit of the couple was him falling into someone else's expectations again. Even in his final scene, we see him stepping up to help a kid, although he's finally acting on the expectations of the less powerful than the more...

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I also hate the change. The discovery queue is ridiculous. I recently bought Final Fantasy Type 0 which is some weird off-brand Final Fantasy game that was originally released for the PSP or Vita (I've never followed the handheld gaming scene so I don't know the difference) and ended up as a PC Port. It has incredibly mixed reviews on Steam because people don't like the PC Port (I think it looks fine and don't really care about that), and it is much smaller and tighter in scope than a traditional FF game (a major selling point in my book, but obviously not what a lot of fans of the genre are looking for). Anyway, I'm enjoying this game for kind of idiosyncratic reasons because I typically hate JRPGs, just find them dull and super uninteresting. But now Steam looks at me playing this weird JRPG with kind of mediocre reviews, and decides that my discovery queue should now be filled with bad JRPGs, no matter how many times I click the "not interested" button.

The discovery queue also has the problem in that it never learns what I'm *NOT* interested in. During the last Steam sale where they encouraged you to keep going through it, I must have hit "not interested" on every possible Final Fantasy game, as well as several other series...yet it never learned to not show me any more of them.

So yeah, it's been a long time since the Steam front page introduced me to a new, cool game....but instead, the Activity page has done that. Maybe it's just having a few certain people on my friends list who I consider "taste makers", but if I see someone buying something, posting screenshots, or getting a bunch of weird looking achievements I will check a game out. That's the sort of thing Steam should be highlighting more than weird queues that will never stop trying to make me like anime.

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The discovery queue also has the problem in that it never learns what I'm *NOT* interested in. During the last Steam sale where they encouraged you to keep going through it, I must have hit "not interested" on every possible Final Fantasy game, as well as several other series...yet it never learned to not show me any more of them.

So yeah, it's been a long time since the Steam front page introduced me to a new, cool game....but instead, the Activity page has done that. Maybe it's just having a few certain people on my friends list who I consider "taste makers", but if I see someone buying something, posting screenshots, or getting a bunch of weird looking achievements I will check a game out. That's the sort of thing Steam should be highlighting more than weird queues that will never stop trying to make me like anime.

That's, for better or worse, by design. Somewhere if you read around in Steam, it explicitly says that Not Interested will have no effect on recommendations, it just removes that item from ever being suggested.

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The thing you guys were saying about the puzzles in The Witness taking a turn for the difficult after first 30 minutes I somewhat understand, I was just following the breadcrumb trail of progression in the glowing cables from puzzle to puzzle until the game turned me loose. I spent a few minutes exploring the immediate area and came across a few puzzles I had no clue how to solve, but instead of beating my head against the wall on it, I wandered somewhere else, toward something that in the distance that looked intriguing

What I learned from that fairly early, is that many of the distinct areas you'll explore also have their own learning stages and ramping up to introduce a specific puzzle mechanic like the opening. And then continue with their own glowing trails of progression. Some are easier than the opening section, some are more difficult, some go from 0 to 60 in 2 seconds, while some barely require any thought at all. But if you ever run into a puzzle you don't comprehend, exploring the island alone will bring you to some simpler puzzles, or the tutorials for those ones you were clueless about before. It's so open and there's so much to see, I never saw a difficult puzzle as a roadblock until I was at the very end, because there was always somewhere else to explore, and a totally different puzzle to try. There's dozens of different things you could be doing at any one time. Perhaps you simply had not played enough at the time of recording to take that all in, has your opinion on that changed any after putting more time in?

Even after finishing the game, I went back and promptly found stuff I missed in the first 25 hours, despite being what I thought was incredibly thorough. The island may seem small after a while, but it's very dense, and exploring it was just as rewarding as solving a long puzzle chain for me. So my advice instead of just taking a break and coming back later when stumped would be to set off in a new direction, there's plenty of other stuff to see and do.

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On the Fargo discussion, I was really surprised by Danielle's reactions to Peggy and Mike. The idea that Peggy was some sort of condemnation of feminism just seems so far off the mark to me. Peggy is a tragic figure because, having occupied the role society dictated for her rather than making her own choices, she went a bit nuts. Her problem wasn't that she failed to shut up and accept her role, it was that she ever tried to fit in with the patriarchy to begin with. If she had felt free to explore the world and herself, I don't think she ends up making so many bad decisions. And looking at Season One and the other women in Season Two, it seems like Noah Hawley has a pretty consistent message that bad things happen when women are marginalized: a lot of lives could have been saved had people listened to Molly early in Season One, the Gerhardts probably would've fared better under the mother's leadership, Simone presumably would not have betrayed her family if he father had not treated her so horribly, etc. And Mike was just such a fantastic character. I was confused by Danielle's suggestion in a previous episode that Mike was using "jive talk", when it seemed to me he was doing exactly the opposite, a very stilted, friendly-sounding (even when it wasn't friendly at all), neutral tone. I actually wondered if the actor wasn't doing a sort of Obama-as-70's-gangster impression, with his overly emphasized calm, deliberate, smooth speech. I'm glad Danielle warmed to Mike a little bit at least. I can't wait to see where Fargo goes next (I think I read that they've said it may return to present day and Molly Solverson will return?), and as an X-Men fan, I am so curious to see what Noah Hawley does with that Legion series.

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I actually saw the Best of Enemies documentary a few weeks ago, and none of my friends are much into serious discussion, so it was awesome to hear people talk about that. It was an incredibly compelling piece of history and filmmaking, while being an incredibly depressing look at where pundit politics started and thinking about where we are now.